Forum:New website structure
As some of you know, I've been working weeks on a new Freeciv website. It includes a new, nice looking forum full of feature, with part of the failed forum database I crawled with complex scripts; It collects the whole wikia itself and puts it under the main, home section of the website. It is mirrored under mediawiki software that runs on the same machine of forum. Crawling here is again a complex task. It crawles 24/7 keeping the two wikis constantly synchronized. Any change made to wikia's pages gets mirrored to mediawiki in 1-2 days, and changes made to mediawiki's pages are preserved (patched) over refreshes from wikia. No data, from both sides, is ever dropped. Also, website includes a section that organizes automated collected information about freeciv; at the moment these are mailing lists and (eventually) IRC chat. The idea behind such a grouping of all (most) freeciv places inside one single website is that we're not providing a bright lighthouse where roaming people should collect around. This is a real practical problem: consider the enormous quantity of people that is constantly trying to get in and understand what freeciv, the game and the community, is made of. Sourceforge is pushing as much as 25.000 downloads per month (check it). My feeling is simply that we are rejecting them all making for them so difficult to understand the online decentralization we have. I admit it was discouraging for me too when years ago I couldn't understand where the "freeciv place" was. I worked to fix this and the outcome is http://freeciv-mundi.org/home (http://freeciv-mundi.org/forum). General opinions are good. I'm still working on it and I made the corrections you suggested. What do you think? Would you like to see this under the freeciv.org domain name? Suggestions for improvements are welcome. Davide at debian 19:54, April 17, 2012 (UTC) Great! Was really needed. As a new player (and not knowing any other 4X game) I find myself lost in the online structure, or absence of. Tons of basic information seem to be missing or hard to find. After weeks of playing every day, I'm still completely ignorant eg of trivial movement rules, apparently, as for instance I cannot understand why at times my unit cannot move further than 1 tile while on a road, or why ennemies can move passing by my units as if they had no ZoC. But where are those rules explained? I ended up guessing that the source tile counts, not the dest one, which btw is completely unintuitive (going up onto a mountain is easy, going down into a valley is hard)... I'm sttil also searching any kind of information about AI stategies and behaviour (esp. about diplomacy and judgement). Despite all of that, I love the game, play it everyday, and now usually beat AIs on 'easy' level ;-) About the new website, it looks very good. The home page may have news at the bottom instead of in the middle of the page, since newcomers aren't interested in them, and people who search news, precisely, can just press 'down' to reach them directly. The forum looks cool. (Anyway anything is imo better than wikia, their editor that takes years to load, and those tons of self-ads at top and bottom of every page.) Denis, Denispir (talk) 20:23, January 10, 2013 (UTC)